About Me

Gregg Walker is a Harlem Resident and 1997 graduate of Yale Law School who worked as an investment banker for 9 years and was the Vice President of Strategy and Mergers & Acquisitions at Viacom for 3 years. Gregg served as the Senior Vice President of Corporate Development at Sony from 2009 to 2016, and he launched his own private investing firm in July 2016 (www.gawalker.co). Gregg was chosen in 2010 by Crain's as one of NYC's 40 Under 40 Rising Stars (http://mycrains.crainsnewyork.com/40under40/profiles/2010/gregg-walker). Gregg is a Deacon at Abyssinian Baptist Church and served as the chairman of the Board of the Harlem YMCA. He has served on the Boards of movie studio MGM and music publishing companies Sony/ATV and EMI Music Publishing. He is also a Board member of Harlem RBI and Derek Jeter's Turn 2 Foundation. He is a former Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a representative of the US at the 2002 Young Leaders Conference of the American Council on Germany. Gregg is also a member of many other foundations and community organizations.

Monday, February 1, 2010

Mayor Bloomberg's generous spending of our tax dollars to reward his campaign advisors with City jobs has coupled with his personal spending to create a scandal dynamic, while Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is shining in the midst of the Haitian tragedy as she leads the effort to get the United States to allow Haitian immigrants to remain in the US for a minimum of eighteen months while the Haitian recovery and rebuilding process begins.

The Mayor has decided that our tax dollars should be used to reward his campaign workers, despite his "doomsday" budget cuts that slash the jobs of so many hard working City workers. He has also been caught in the most obvious case of "pay to play" politics we have ever witnessed. These latest pieces follow the growing scandal of Bloomberg's enormous bonuses paid to his campaign staff (many of whom had worked for the City and were taking a leave of absence to support the Bloomberg campaign) out of his personal fortune.

The hiring of Bloomberg's campaign advisors to City jobs is somewhat shocking during this period of cost cutting. The advisors, fifteen of them, are not inexpensive additions to the labor pool at City Hall. Many of them are earning six-figure salaries, and they include some of the highest paid City Hall workers. To add insult to injury, Bloomberg has hired seven advisors who left their City Hall jobs to work on the campaign. That brings us to 22 workers and more than $2 million of annual expense that is now the responsibility of the tax payers and is entirely devoted to compensating Bloomberg's campaign staff while City workers face cuts.

As Bloomberg demands reduced services for all of us who live in New York City, and as he proposes 18,000 lay offs of City workers, he generously rewards his campaign staff with high-paying positions in City Hall. Some of the positions were created specifically to allow his campaign staff to shift to taxpayer funding.

This latest scandal is part of a pattern. Bloomberg provided retroactive raises to his City Hall staff last summer despite the harsh economic times and his calls for cuts nearly everywhere else in the city government. The pattern has its roots in Bloomberg's three electoral victories and the large bonuses he paid out of his personal fortune to his campaign staff. Some on the campaign earned more than $400,000 for two months of work.

The retroactive raises and the creation of City Hall jobs for campaign staff are clear evidence of Bloomberg's arrogance and unwillingness to apply the same "belt tightening" requirements to himself that he demands of others. The lavish bonuses are a potentially corrupting influence on our politics, particularly because so many of the campaign workers had been working in the City government until late in the campaign.

France and other nations worked very hard to bankrupt and undermine Haiti over two centuries. The emergence of a free Black nation in the Western Hemisphere was unacceptable to many part of the Western World. The forced end of slavery in Haiti was a great victory for the concept of freedom, but it was the reason that Haiti was forced to be a poor country. The Western World was determined to punish Haiti for being the first country to end slavery on a timetable set by the slaves rather than by the slave owners. Now, we hope that the tragedy that began in January 2010 in Haiti will help the world address the tragedy that has been occurring in Haiti for centuries. The world is responding to the earthquake.

As the world works to help the people of Haiti to build a stronger and better country, we could not be more proud of our Senator for leading our country as our country leads the world.